Afterthought
by safa'at keruth
Summary: Jou/Malik for Always a Bookworm, post-series. Malik returns to Domino, bitter with the knowledge that those who try to change most often do not succeed, and Jounouchi finds himself the unlikely guardian of his mental stability.


**A/N: **Written as a prizefic for the lovely **Always a Bookworm**, who won Round 1 of **The Yu-Gi-Oh Fanfiction Contest**. Well, I just wrote you a 6,500+ Irateshipping, Bookworm, half of which is exposition. I hope the plotline is worth the wait xD

WARNING: Jounouchi x Malik, implied Ryou x YB and Kaiba x Shizuka; underage drinking, mild profanity, and rather shameless fluff near the end. Disturbed!Ryou, cameo'd!Isis/Rishid, mature!Jounouchi, unhappy!Yugi, and parenthetical overdose. Don't like, don't read.

Disclaimer: I don't own Yu-Gi-Oh. Enjoy!

* * *

**Afterthought**

_"Life happens. Live with it."_

* * *

It was snowing the day that Malik Ishtar reappeared in Jounouchi's life, shivering and wild-eyed and yet so very _Malik_ (he hadn't changed a bit over the years; whether that was good or bad Jounouchi would never quite know)—so very proud and sharp-tongued and sarcastic, because nobody but Malik himself chose to remember that change did not come easily to those who bore the scars of nonconformity, and that was something that Jounouchi would only find out much later.

Isis was actually the first one he saw, because Malik had been bundled up into a thick winter jacket with black scarves shrouding his face like the veils that covered the heads of the people of the Middle East. With those over his eyes and voice, there was none of his fire left to flare out and announce his presence. It was Isis, her blue eyes cool and unchanged by the years, who rang the doorbell of the Kame Game Shop and asked (oh-so-politely, of course, because Isis was always polite) if the Ishtars could stay with Yugi for a few days while they moved into their new home in Domino.

Yugi, his very soul brittle and fragile from the unspeakable days not quite two years ago, could not refuse, and his grandfather was simply glad to have more additions to Yugi's circle of friends. And so it was determined that Isis, Malik, and Rishid would take up temporary residence with the Mutous—at least, until the people of Japan deemed it fit for a trio of unnaturally fluent foreigners (who did not speak a word of English like most foreigners did) to buy a house.

Malik arrived in school the following Monday, the hem of his uniform rather ostentatiously rolled up to bare his midriff, and was promptly issued a lecture about proper attire by the spluttering principal—which he ignored utterly and completely, even going as far as to take off his entire shirt and leave him wearing nothing but a tank top underneath.

Yugi saw enough to blush, a high reaction for someone who had not laughed for months straight; Honda cracked jokes for the rest of the week as Anzu grumbled at his immaturity. Kaiba was far gone, immersed in the running of his company with none of his authority to show save for the worried way his younger brother fidgeted during classes—Mokuba could concentrate on nobody those days that his elder brother was running on nothing but caffeine and the ghosts of dredged up memories. Ryou did not seem to notice Malik's existence at all—but then, Ryou was always a strange one, and he had only grown quieter since the time his darker half was shoved into the Shadow Realm on the heels of a black monster sporting a dragon's neck at its crotch.

Yugi-tachi's reactions varied from scandalized to amused to simply apathetic, but Jounouchi was different. Jounouchi looked at Malik when the Egyptian wasn't with anyone else, when he sat on the sidelines during lunch and ate his strange native foods from a plastic container in silence. And, as outside the window the snowflakes fluttered or clumped or fell with the hiss of rain, he wondered if Malik was cold.

(Soon, he got his answer.)

"Damn snow," Malik grumbled as they were walking home, kicking at a patch of white with a booted foot. "This place has far too much of it for me to see it as a miracle anymore."

"Since when is it a miracle? Do you really believe in that Ancient Egyptian stuff?" Honda asked, carelessly, tactlessly, an offhand question for an offhand remark.

Jounouchi, his head quickly snapping up, was fast enough to catch a glimpse of a rare sight: Malik's face, already surly, shutting down and blanking out like the slowly fading screen of a computer, his normally expressive violet eyes becoming flat. "No," he said, his voice as sharp and cold as the biting wind that whipped around them, and Honda turned away into safer topics.

But Jounouchi, softened and changed from those long, long years of death and magic and Pharaohs who were friends one day and deserters the next, was not the uncaring gang member he had been before Yugi slammed into his life with the force of a timid but uncontrollable train, bringing with him tales of ancient worlds and a golden object that had somehow not yet broken his neck while he wore it on a chain. Jounouchi had learned to observe, to care, to look at one person and wonder _why_ exactly they smoked or fought or bought boxes of crackers on sale—to wonder if they were the next would-be ruler of the world.

He saw how Malik's blond head was bent down, how his hands clenched themselves into fists in his pockets, how his steps were light but careful, like those of someone who had just broken their ankle slipping on ice. Jounouchi had seen him snap at teachers and friends alike, flirt with both girls and boys, be almost painfully bright one day and moodily contemplative the next. In other words, he saw Malik become just another normal teenager; he saw in Malik what he had seen in dozens of others students at Domino High.

And yet, perhaps because Malik had controlled the minds of men far older than him and wrenched himself away from the traditions of old, Jounouchi found himself watching him closely. There was something _off_about him, something odd in the way his laugh was harsh and sarcastic, in the way Jounouchi could tell that he had (honestly) not changed one bit from the bitter, demented boy he had been when he wore a purple cloak with the Eye of Wdjat on the hood. Malik was not the person who had met Yugi and the Pharaoh at the airport of Cairo with a smile on his face and hope falling like rain from his lips; he had reverted back, almost, and Jounouchi knew enough about the term 'downward spiral' to want to pull him out of it.

Immersed in his thoughts, Jounouchi almost didn't notice that he had fallen far behind the group—further even than Ryou, who sometimes stopped and stared at the snow for minutes on end as if trying to see something in its immaculate crystalline depths. There was nobody near him but Malik, eyes fiery and resentful and holding in them a spark of the madness that had led to the emotional wreckage after Battle City.

And somehow, he was not surprised when the Egyptian teen asked him abruptly, "Want to come over to my house today?"

Jounouchi thought and realized that at his own home there was nobody but his drunken father who would not care less if he went missing for months on end and a neatly made bed with bits of shattered glass on the floor beside it—memories from a life that he had never wished to lead. So he nodded and agreed, and wondered to himself why Malik had not even bothered to offer up an excuse.

_What does he want with me?_

* * *

_Ryou's eyes blinked at him from the crack he had nudged open between the door of his apartment and the wall, confused and lost and eerily empty._

_Malik liked that quality to them—it was better, at least, than the desperation that he knew shone in his when night came and the dreams came with it, dancing like the taunting glow of flames through his mind and searing it beyond mend every single time. It was better than the anger that sometimes worked its way through his entire body for no reason in particular, until he felt like a spring wound far beyond the point where it should have turned in on itself and snapped, until he had to grit his teeth and ball his fists and think of the nightmares to prevent himself from exploding into a million silent pieces. The emptiness was better than anything he could be, and from what he had heard, Ryou had always been the overachiever._

_"Malik." His name was a statement, and Ryou was evidently not expecting an answer._

_"Bakura Ryou-kun." Malik chose his words carefully, because Japanese was an unpredictable language and (more importantly) he had never quite figured out who exactly Ryou was to him._

_Ryou was silent, expectant, and Malik admired that. He would have cracked under the suspense by then, grabbed his visitor by the throat and shaken him, demanding what they wanted. He would have been nervous and uncertain; he would have had no idea what to do—because, as much as Isis tried to tell herself otherwise, growing up the revered heir of a underground clan not numbering one hundred members left a person with a horrendous lack of social skills._

_(and because **he** was laughing and mocking and **there**, because a part of yourself can never leave)_

_"Can I come in?" Malik said at last, and his answer was the slight inching open of the door—ah, but Ryou had certainly grown guarded since the last time Malik had seen him, a stranger at a stranger's funeral during the Ceremonial Duel._

_"What do you want?" Ryou asked finally after a few terribly quiet minutes of them simply sitting on his threadbare couch, the walls decorated by nothing but dusty bookshelves and haphazard blankets and pillows, a metal radiator plugged in on the other side of the room. His voice was a sliver of sound, barely audible above the hum of the heating system and the muffled sounds of life that struggled their way in from the closed window. They were cut off from the world, almost, and it was as if they did not live in what was practically the center of the dueling world, as if they were the only ones left in the universe, suspending in nothingness with only each other's unwelcome company._

_Malik didn't know if he liked it or not._

_"I don't know," Malik admitted honestly, leaning back and flinching upright again when his spine hit the edge of a book, knocking it to the floor. (Ryou made no move to retrieve it.) "Closure, I guess. Confusion, also possible. Or maybe just for the hell of it."_

_"Closure?" Ryou asked flatly, latching on, however unwillingly, to that one sentence. "For what? For telling the spirit to stab me in the arm to deceive Yugi-tachi, for forcing me into control during his duel with the other Yugi, for sending my soul to the Shadow Realm? I'd expect that you aren't sorry about that, Ishtar Malik-san."_

_His tone was calm as he continued, somehow overriding Malik's feeble protests. "You're here to see me because Yugi is an emotional mess and you're a psychological one, and you want to believe that after all we've been through, after all the times our minds have been locked in the darkness with the Shadows free to eat at them, we can still be normal. You're here to see if I'm not insane or mourning; you're here to see if I'm Bakura Ryou or just some remnant of the past with his soul too strongly tied to the spirit to keep it when he Fell with Zorc._

_"Let me tell you this: I'm not."_

_Malik's heart sank as Ryou turned to him, and he saw in his eyes that Isis and Rishid were wrong. Everything would **not** be all right, because the Items had left them branded with the unmistakable sign of the insane; they had transcended the world by tampering with magic that was far older than it—_

_(—and for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction—)_

—_they had been immortal for those short moments, held still through the passage of time by the hands of those who would wish to see them crumble under the weight of reality, and they had fallen._

_(and his **yami** was always there to remind him)_

_Oh, but they had Fallen hard._

* * *

"Stay with me over the night," Malik shouted in Jounouchi's ear so that he could be heard over the chest-deep blast of the nightclub's music, a drink clenched in his hand so hard that his fingers were white—or maybe that was just the flashing strobe lights that pulsed red and blue and green, sweeping the dance floor and reflecting oddly onto everyone's faces so that they looked like they had evolved under a different star, so that purple was yellow and blue was red. His words were sloppy and unclear, his accent more perceptible than ever.

"What?" Jounouchi yelled back, uncertain as to how exactly he had ended up there with the Egyptian teen by his side, sitting at a bar as incongruously as two blonds in a country full of black-haired people could. He had a bad feeling about the entire scene, a twist in his stomach that told him that the night was going to end badly—or maybe that was just the alcohol he had drunk; would that be four shots or five?

(It was a good thing they looked older than they actually were, because otherwise they would have been arrested by now—or at least when he and Malik stepped out to a world of slowly drifting flakes and did something stupid like snowball fight empty buildings with holographic monsters that _couldn't _be real, at least not to the cops—)

"_Stay with me_," Malik purred, his breath warm on Jounouchi's cheek, and Jounouchi felt a shiver go down his spine when he realized that Malik had inadvertently switched back to his native Arabic, the unintelligible syllables of the foreign tongue sounding almost sinister coming from the Egyptian's lips. He had a brief vision of golden eyes shattering dark mist and the disembodied voice of someone no older than him resounding through his mind, and he jerked away from Malik's bent head.

"I'm taking you home," he said with more force than he had thought he would possess in this kind of situation, and his stomach sank when he imagined the long lecture from Isis that would come when he returned Malik to his house.

_(but at least you aren't leaving him alone in a room full of people who would be only too glad to rob him and hurt him and do things much worse while the nightmares plague his pretty cursed head—)_

And so the stilling snow found him dragging Malik's wasted body along the street, while the other boy did nothing to help him but instead laughed and pointed wildly around and sobbed lines of Arabic and something more ancient-sounding that sent charged bits of foreboding swarming through the air. The passersby were nonexistent and the orange glow of the streetlamps overlapped their pools of light so that the entire landscape looked almost dreamlike, painted white and yellow by the sparkle of frozen water, turned into a landscape of tiny rolling hills by the uneven settling of the snow. (Jounouchi couldn't decide whether that was good or bad, whether he was actually striding along empty streets with a bipolar boy who had tried to take over the world, whether they were inexplicably safe in a land where there were no strangers or if the shadows groped with their blindly seeking arms to catch hold of their passing legs.)

"Help," Malik whimpered suddenly after a few blessed minutes of silence, digging his heels in so that Jounouchi almost lost hold of his arm. The Egyptian's head was turned up the sky, his eyes wide and imploring, his clasped fingers trembling with the cold or something else. _"You said you would help me!"_ he screamed at the unresponsive clouds, _"You told me—"_

Jounouchi recovered from his shock enough to slap his hand over Malik's mouth and hiss, "Shut up, we're almost at your house and Isis will _kill_ me if you wake up half the neighborhood—"

Malik's expression was disoriented, his eyes darting over Jounouchi's face. He mumbled something that sounded like 'let me go,' but Jounouchi didn't listen and continued to tug him up the stairs of the apartment building where the Ishtars lived.

Rishid answered the door with an almost expectant look on his face, but it swiftly dissolved into blankness when Malik immediately latched on to him, saying something in Arabic with a blithe smile on his face that contrasted almost grotesquely with the tears that streaked down his cheeks. There were patches of wetness on his jeans where he had kicked snow onto his clothing, and in the warm light of the Ishtars' apartment he appeared more disheveled than ever—one glove missing, his scarf unraveled and trailing on the ground, his boots halfway unlaced with white flakes still clinging, unmelted, to their heels.

Rishid yanked his younger brother into the room, beckoning quickly for Jounouchi to follow him, and shut the door behind them so that he was suddenly enveloped in a warm, homelike atmosphere, with the smell of some Middle Eastern cuisine drifting in from the kitchen. It was so far from what his own house looked like, with nothing but the intermittent heating and cans of beer and bottles of sake strewn across the cold wooden floor—nobody left to give it life, because his father was slipping further and further away from humanity with each new drink he took and Shizuka had already fled to the safer reaches of Yugi-tachi and Kaiba's houses (sometime before, Jounouchi would have objected to her dating Kaiba, would have yelled at the other and threatened him and fought him while Kaiba did—what, exactly? He didn't know how the young CEO would have responded—while Kaiba did nothing; but now he could not find it in him to destroy her happiness in such a manner) and he was too different from the energetic teen he had once been, too engrossed in Malik and change and the vestiges of the insanity Atem had left behind him to do anything.

And yet, Jounouchi was fine and still standing with both feet firmly on the ground of mental stability while Malik with his loving family crumbled and hung onto the ledge by his fingertips as if trying to decide whether it was worth it to let go or not.

(If he had asked, Jounouchi would have had no answer for him.)

It was an odd paradox, certainly—did it mean that he was, somehow, the better in character, to survive in a world where there was no care but the blindly loyal heart of his oh-so-innocent younger sister? Perhaps it simply meant that Malik had gone through worse than him, had been carved open with a burning knife over and over again to make sure the scars remained for a lifetime, because Jounouchi had fallen far into gangs and violence and drinking too before Yugi jerked him out with those pleading hopeful purple eyes and his promises of a better future. Maybe Malik was doomed, doomed by whatever forces he had dabbled in during Battle City, and the Shadows had yanked him into the deep waters of psychosis and left him there to drown.

* * *

"I need your address."

"Excuse me?" Jounouchi spluttered, almost choking on the mouthful of noodles he had just eaten. (Later, he would swear that Malik had dropped that pleasant bit of information at that particular moment on purpose, just for his own wicked amusement.) Malik was in one of his better moods, his tongue still sharp and his temper prone to unexpected flares, but not quite as inclined to argue as he had been the previous day.

"Your address," Malik repeated with exaggerated enunciation, rolling those odd violet eyes. "Do I have to spell it ou—oh, right. _Japanese has no alphabet._" His voice was acerbic as he slapped down a pen and paper onto the lunch table. "Address, now."

"Why?" Jounouchi asked, remembering what had happened the last time he had complied with one of Malik's ideas—a night at a bar a few weeks ago, bringing the other teen back to his house where the paling of Isis's face at Malik's condition had been enough to make Jounouchi feel guilty.

In answer, Malik handed him another paper, this one filled with very official-looking _kanji_ that detailed the fact that Ishtar Malik had been chosen to participate in a foreign exchange program with a rather prestigious school in New York City.

_You are permitted to select another male student from Domino High School to participate with you_, the letter read._ Your choice must be evaluated by the Board of Education before acceptance. If you wish to invite one of your classmates, then please mail the additional form attached to this letter to 15 Meiyo Street by the end of this week. The program will begin on the first of February, 2011_...

Jounouchi handed it back to Malik, not quite sure what to say. "... You're inviting _me_ to go to New York City with you?"

Malik arched an eyebrow. "I imagine that neither of us have been there before." Jounouchi had a feeling that he was testing him by deliberately making a reference to the fact that his family was nowhere near rich enough to afford the fee for a vacation to New York City, no matter how short a time they stayed, no matter his reputation as one of the best duelists apart from Yugi and Kaiba.

(Because even though Pegasus was a born-and-bred American, even though America had nurtured its own craze over Duel Monsters, the time had passed—and New Yorkers, engrossed in their stock market and their industry and their arts, had always been a difficult group to hold and please.)

"I know," Jounouchi replied, somewhat irritably. "But why me?"

Malik swept a hand dramatically at the rest of the students in the lunchroom—at Mokuba, his black head bent over a textbook and his eyes narrowed in concentration as he blew through his homework in record time (his older brother had already begun tutoring him in algorithms, Jounouchi heard); at Yugi-tachi, still dancing through their daily game of Making Yugi Smile And Forget; at the people dueling each other on the sides or cramming for tests or hanging out with their friends or even laughing with their dates. "Why do you think?" He dropped his voice almost conspiratorially, his face mocking and sarcastic and bitter: "You're the only person here I know."

It was that more than anything else that made Jounouchi, if reluctantly, fill out the forms and tell Yugi-tachi that he and Malik would be leaving for New York City in a few weeks: the pity that welled up inside him when he realized that after all, Malik was still alone in a world of a people who did not understand the meaning of the words burned into his back, of a people who could not make a single move without consulting books of law to make sure it wasn't illegal, of a people who were not accepting or forgiving or kind.

Reality had hit him with all the force of a thousand suns, and Malik was drowning.

* * *

_"You're back."_

_Ryou was quite the master of the monotone, Malik mused as he stepped into the small apartment once more, glancing around at the new additions to the scenery: a cup of weakly steaming tea on the coffee table, a textbook open to a page of pre-calculus, paper and a pen lying on its surface with only a few lines written. There was a bowl of rice with a spoon stuck into it, still full and barely touched. Malik glanced at a loose test paper on the floor with a 72 scrawled over the top in painfully red pen, little X's dotting the margins._

_"You're failing history," he observed._

_(__can you think of nothing else to say, stupid boy__?)_

_Ryou shrugged, the slightest movement of his shoulders accentuating the way his sweater hung off his thin frame. He looked sickly, almost, the blankness that could **almost** be tranquility in his eyes undermined by the dark circles that framed them. His face was pale and ghostly, and he seemed to almost be fading into the drabness of his surroundings, sifting away with each movement until there was nothing left but his skeleton lying on the floor._

_It was quite the depressing mental image._

_"You're failing," Malik repeated—was Ryou so far gone to wherever his mind had escaped that he had ceased to care about anything? That he would sit in his apartment all day and do nothing but remember and mourn and try to forget instead of moving on?_

_(**you're** far from moving on yourself, you fool)_

_"So?" Ryou glanced at him, sitting cool and composed on the edge of the sofa, an unspoken request for Malik to copy him—he made no more attempt at manners, Malik saw, beyond the little that would get him past social scrutiny, because the Japanese were an unforgiving people. "Ishtar Malik-san, why are you here again?"_

_"I'm leaving for New York City tomorrow morning," Malik said slowly, unwillingly._

_"Is Domino not to your liking, then?" Ryou's tone was flat and unmoved—a question that he felt need to be asked, not a challenge, not a defense of the city that had been his home in body for the past few years while his dark side killed in behind the backs of the police._

_"It's an exchange program," Malik corrected, and he fell silent, because he did not know what to say. Ryou simply stared off at the wall on the opposite end of the room, unresponsive, and his face was emotionlessly, effortlessly blank—he would do well in the gambling houses of the West, Malik thought, suddenly, irrationally._

_"Go on, ask me."_

_Malik's head snapped up toward the other boy, whose gaze met his with the ease of someone who could not be bothered to hide anything. "Ask you what?"_

_"What you've been wanting to ask since you first visited." Ryou smiled without humor. "I expect your yami visits you during the night, doesn't he? Does he hurt you and frighten you and haunt your dreams like an unstoppable force, like the darkness itself? Are you afraid to tell your so-called friends and family for fear that they will shun you and send you off to people who know nothing of the Sennen Items and less about the powers they possess? Are you terrified each night before you must fall asleep; have you tried caffeine and alcohol and energy drinks to keep yourself awake because you can't stand the thought of what will happen otherwise?_

_"You came here hoping for a kindred spirit, for someone to cling to and confide in, someone to drag you out of the precipice that **he**'s tugged you into. I tell you once more: I have Fallen too, Fallen so far that there is no comeback for me, nothing to save me. And there will be nothing to save you either, so I advise that you make peace with whoever is left before you're so far gone that you will have no desire to, that you make peace with**him** so you can at least be happy enough when you Fall and we will be at different sides of the same Realm, trapped forever."_

_"I_—_" The words caught in Malik's throat, came out as something close to a sob. "Please_—_"_

_"Please what?" Ryou said softly, almost sympathetically but for the detachment in his eyes. "There's nobody to save you now, no magical **deus ex machina**"_—_he pronounced the foreign words with the effortless perfection of his native language_—_"no person willing to jump in and help." The last few words seemed to ignite what semblance of life that remained in the white-haired boy's body, and the desperate fire that Malik had seen in him when Ryou had fought Yami no Bakura for control during the days of Battle City appeared once more. "I had nobody, and you have nobody._

_"Goodbye, Ishtar Malik-san."_

* * *

The first night they arrived in New York City, they moved into a small apartment in downtown Manhattan, near enough to the school that their supposed 'host parents' (rich sponsors who did not actually want two foreign boys camping out in their house) had rented it for a few weeks, completely empty except for the barest living accommodations.

(It was better than his own home, Jounouchi supposed.)

Malik certainly seemed to like it enough, staying up to the ridiculous time of one in the morning doing nothing but tracing the walls with his fingers over and over again, until Jounouchi himself was lulled into sleep by the sheer repetitiveness of the motion. Tired from lack of rest and the fifteen-hour flight, he did not see the panicked light in Malik's face or the way he eventually left the room, locking his door and pulling blankets over his head until he was nothing but a bundle under the dusty layers of cloth. New York City was cold in the winter, and the buildings that sliced their tips into the sky cast shadows of moonlight through his window. The screaming came later, muffled beneath a cocoon of cotton and polyester, and deep in sleep, Jounouchi didn't hear.

He should have noticed, though—should have known from the moment that Malik appeared in Domino City that there was something wrong with the gleam in his eyes and the sting of his words, that his brashness and sarcasm were nothing but decoys set to ensure that reality and imagination would forever remain far, far apart.

_(idiot boy; there **is** no savior)_

He would fight, later, fight with every fiber of his being against an enemy that could dodge his blows like the mercurial flow of air, against a man who was no more than dream and shadow—but for now, he slept in peace.

_(ah, but you know nothing of me now, idiot boy, and you shall fall to the grasping arms of the darkness because there will be nobody to pull you out)_

Malik was falling, falling fast into the world of medicine that did not cure and slow, painful death—falling into the world that Jounouchi's father inhabited with the pride of one who knew no better, falling quickly with wings made of melting wax. He had flown before, flown oh-so-briefly on the jet streams of childhood and hope, but reality was the sun that burned and scalded and could not care less that beneath him was not the killing ocean but the hungry maws of the void.

_(you trust him, I see, but your trust will get you nowhere. He sleeps in ignorance, sleeps in a world where he would rather die than take one step into yours, and he will watch you fade and laugh.)_

_(won't you, traitor-san?)_

* * *

Malik stared down at the tracks of the train station, breathing in deeply the stuffy metallic smell of the subway and trying not to gag. There had been rain the past few days, rain that had slowly turned into snow, and the ceilings of the underground network had not been repaired in decades. The steady drip of a leak disturbed the otherwise prominent silence, for what sane person would wake to take the subway at three in the morning?

_(you are **far** from sane, boy)_

He looked at the puddle of muddy brown water not three feet away, still flowing to some undisclosed location with bits of trash and discarded items bobbing along in it. Those were the little things that nobody wanted, empty soda bottles and plastic wrappers and McDonald's paper bags, joined in a desperate attempt to be _something_, to at least be recognized by each other and not live out the rest of their lives in painful anonymity.

He was drifting, too, not quite awake, almost catatonic from sleeping not more than three hours the previous few days, because the little rest that he _had_ gotten was filled with _his_ words and promises and fingers that left invisible burns down his arms. So he stood there and struggled against the ways his eyes were slowly slipping shut, resting his head against the dirty metal pillars that held up the underground station every ten feet and counting the minutes until morning in his mind.

Why had he even come to this place, ever accepted the student exchange proposal? Being half a world away from the burial ground where the Items lay would not make his nightmares disappear; traveling further to what could easily be the center of industrialization would not help. Ryou had not fought because Ryou was not a fighter, and Ryou was happy enough, living in his world that reality could not touch with the ugly knowledge that he could still care about others, with the knowledge that betrayal existed and loving the wraith that had almost killed his friends would count as the worst sort of treachery. Ryou had given up a long time ago, given up his former dreams of completing school and having people who stood by him in times of trouble; Ryou had already thrown himself into the void with his arms wide and welcoming.

Someone brushed by Malik, nearly tipping him forward and onto the train tracks, and the person did not care enough for a boy who appeared to be either high or wasted to even apologize. Malik caught himself at the last minute, teetering backward and forward like the entropic pendulum of a clock, halfway between safety and death—

—but then, wasn't he always like that?

_(oh, no. you're falling.)_ Flat, sarcastic, utterly uncaring.

_Shut_ _up_, Malik mumbled, too weary to even be surprised that _he_ could speak to him in consciousness now.

_(it's a significant innovation, is it not?)_

_He_ could hear his thoughts now too, it appeared. Malik slumped down against the metal pillar, sitting on the floor and dangling his legs over the edge of the platform. (The drop was not more than a few feet; it was nothing. Nothing.) The stone was warm, at least—one of the small benefits of camping out in a subway station.

_(since when have I not been able to know your thoughts, child-chan?)_

_Battle City finals._ Even Malik's mind felt as if it was moving through molasses, too slow to respond or even form coherent sentences. He had once read that a full day without sleep was equivalent to being drunk; he wondered if it was true. (But he dreamed when he was drunk, he knew, so the two statements contradicted and left him with his head pounding and the darkness laughing at him—)

_(you have not slept well, child-chan? Tell me why. Are you afraid?)_

_No_, Malik said—a lie, a blatant lie, given only because he had nothing else to say.

_(still waiting for traitor-san to rescue you, I see_—_and what makes you think he will? You lie with the best of them, child-chan, so he suspects nothing, and therefore will not investigate. He knows you from the time when you hated him and all his friends, you see, and because of that he knows to leave you well enough alone, to deal with your problems yourself...)_

_No, Jounouchi would_—

_(he is no better than you, and you can see how far you have Fallen now. You have seen where the little ghost-speaker ended up, and you will join him soon with traitor-san none the wiser.)_

Malik closed his eyes, his throat closing up and his heart sinking with the sluggish flow of water on the tracks, and he pretended that those weren't tears running down his cheeks, that he didn't care whether he died or lived—because _he_ was going to kill him tonight; he could feel the knowledge in the grim satisfaction that emanated from every pore of _his_ being. He would fall, fall down into the chasm that Ryou had dived headfirst (dived willingly) into, because he had never been smart enough to make peace enough to be happy.

(He had never been happy. Never.)

_(crying, are we, child-chan?)_

Malik didn't answer, his breath hitching painfully. He would never see his family again. (He didn't care.) He would never see Egypt again. (He didn't want to.) Never, ever again—

_(jump, child-chan, jump.)_

The yellow headlights of an approaching train glowed blood-red behind his eyelids, turning brighter and brighter and brighter with each passing second. The roar of viciously streamlined wind, the hum of old engines, the rumbling of the tracks: they all echoed in his ears, a symphony for his death.

_Dear gods, I will never see Jounouchi again._

_(And I want to.)_

The nightmares loomed in his mind's eye; _he_ loomed at their head, the vanguard, the herald, laughing and smiling and mocking with the golden Eye of Wdjat on his forehead and the lines of his face warped half-translucent into the shadows—a horrific standard for a horrific end. Malik's heart pounded, but he couldn't move, because death meant endless darkness and life meant endless fear, and he wanted neither and he was terrified of both—

(The train didn't care, and the train kept going.)

—but then there were strong, warm arms yanking him out of the way as the shrieking whistle of the breaks cut through the station, and there was an oh-so-familiar voice yelling angrily in his ear, "You idiot! You damn _idiot!_ What the hell were you _thinking_? You could have been _killed_—"

The train passed them by in a blur of silver, and Malik opened his eyes to see Jounouchi's furious face glaring down at his, something akin to worry shining in those brown eyes, shaking him by the shoulders and demanding something that Malik couldn't decipher because he couldn't lip-read—

(Maybe he should learn.)

Having vented enough when his voice could not be heard, Jounouchi's fury changed to genuine concern. "What happened?"

Malik could not answer, the relief bubbling up in his chest swelling to cut off his lungs as _his_ disbelieving voice faded into nothingness and the trepidation that he had lived with for so many years was blown away, as the shadows cleared and left him standing in blinding golden light. "I-I—_thank you_," he said fervently, twisting around to wrap his arms tightly around the other teen's body. "Thank you, thank you _so much_—"

Jounouchi blinked down at him in confusion before forcing Malik's head up to meet his eyes. "You'll explain later."

"I will," Malik promised, feeling giddy and light with the weight on his mind and soul finally gone. "I swear I will."

Jounouchi hugged him then, hugged him like he would hug a friend, like he would hug a lover, like he would hug a person close to his heart who needed the comfort, and Malik relaxed in his embrace, because he was finally _free_.

(Dear gods, he was free.)

And they sat like that for what felt like hours on end, as the feet of passersby during rush hour paused around them, as the whisper of voices formed a sweet harmony in their ears, as the flash of cameras left afterimages in their eyes. They sat as the trains came and left, as the tears on Malik's cheeks dried into nothing, as his eyes slipped shut with tiredness and he slept without dreams for the first time in years.

They sat as one man, thinking they were street performers, threw some money at their feet and the rest of the station's visitors that day followed his example, so that by the time the platform was quiet and empty, there was a small pile of coins and bills on the ground.

And they laughed together each time a small offering of cash was deposited in front of them, because it was finally over.

* * *

**Epilogue**

* * *

"How much did we make that day?" Malik asked, grinning.

Jounouchi rolled his eyes, although he was unable to stop his returning smile. "I told you already: four thousand, one hundred and sixty-eight yen. I swear, even Pegasus would be proud."

Malik smirked back at him with his conspiratory smile, mocking the American's trademark saying. _"Un-be-liev-a-ble!"_

(Because Malik had not changed one bit, and in moments like this, that was a good thing.)

* * *

**End**

* * *

**A/N: **Yes, I just took a stab at Japanese Pegasus and his constant (very badly accented, I may add) speaking of a ridiculously dragged-out '_Un-be-liev-a-ble!'_ during the anime's duels.

Endnotes: _Algorithms _are a form of applied math that relate directly to the running of a computer system. I imagine Kaiba would want his younger brother to know about them. New York City subway systems are really like what I described, so please don't be offended. I love NYC as much as the rest of you. *hearts*

_**Reviews **_would be awesome; _**concrit **_is appreciated. So review, please :]


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